Baffled by strange "ghost" pictures on cellphone

Long story short, tonight my boyfriend took 3 different pictures of our youngest son on his cellphone.
When you try to view the photos in the gallery, they aren't there.
What is there however, are 3 pictures neither of us have seen or remember taking, which I refer to as the "ghost" photos.
What's even weirder, is if you select one of the ghost photos from the thumbnails, and then zoom in, it actually changes over to the picture of our
son. Then when you zoom out, it goes back to the ghost photo.

I have no idea if I can embed a screenshot or short video from my phone, so I'll just describe these as best I can til I figure that out.

Ghost photo #1: The first one creeped me out the most. It's a very bizzare blurry picture of what looks like someone (or something) standing in a
doorway. To me, it looks like the doorway of our oldest sons room in the house we lived in 4 years ago.

Ghost photo #2: a close up of someone's left hand in the bedroom of our house we moved out of last year.

Ghost photo #3: a random picture of the same room as pic #2, just showing my computer desk and the dirty clothes pile.

I have to note that my boyfriend didn't even buy this phone until about 6 months ago, and that's why we're completely baffled as to how these
pictures ended up on it.

Also, I had him try to send me the first ghost photo in a txt message. It ended up sending the picture of my son.

Is it possible for cellphones to have weird glitches like that, where you view a pic, zoom in and it changes?
Im hoping for a logical explanation so I can stop being creeped out now

Yes, it's entirely possible for this to happen. Especially if photos have been taken or placed on to the phone, and then later deleted. When viewing
the thumbnails on your phone, you're usually viewing a lower resolution, and entirely separate file to the photo itself.

If there has been some form of corruption or error on the phone when photos have been deleted; then it's likely the thumbnail file associated to that
photo was not deleted. The thumbnails will generally be numbered, and when you took the photos of your son; those photos were assigned the same
numbers as those old thumbnails. When you view the photos themselves, the phone then reads and displays the actual photo file.

That's why they're showing up under different thumbnails, but when viewed; appear correctly.

a reply to: Movhisattva
That's what I was wanting to do. Film the photo gallery with my phone so I could
show what it did when I zoomed in and out. Its better to see it, I don't feel I described well enough.

originally posted by: casijones
although I still feel something's off with that 1st picture. Even my boyfriend said something like, "this is like how one of those bad horror movies
starts... and I don't want to be that guy" haha.

Your boyfriend has a good sense of humour!

By the sounds of it, the photos seem like the kind of thing that was taken by accident in the past and then deleted without much thought. You
generally don't think at the time that they'll resurface as creepy photos out of context.

For the record, this has happened to me in the past. I went to Europe and took a bunch of photos on my phone. When going through them all, the
thumbnails were all mixed up and even showed up photos of friends or places I had been to before that time, and did show the thumbnails from
previously deleted photos (including accidental pocket photos). Was a nightmare to go through them all. But it happens!

I know you said it was a new phone purchased about 6 months ago, and the photos at least a few are of a place from years ago. Did you or he by chance
use an old memory card from the previous phone that could have contained the pictures you are seeing? Thats about the only logical explanation I would
have for this.

originally posted by: jaynkeel
I know you said it was a new phone purchased about 6 months ago, and the photos at least a few are of a place from years ago. Did you or he by chance
use an old memory card from the previous phone that could have contained the pictures you are seeing? Thats about the only logical explanation I would
have for this.

Yes, I agree. how would you have pics that are years old on a phone thats 6 months old, unless you have a sim card or an old sd card in it.

Sounds like corruption. Jpeg images can have an embedded thumbnail separate from the main image this makes it very fast to scroll through thumbnails.
When you zoom in the image will switch from the thumbnail to the main image.

It's sounds suspiciously to me like a corruption of your images where they have picked up an embedded thumbnail from a.n.other image.

If you were to edit the photos, very slightly and re-save a new thumbnail will be created based on the original (full size) image.

I know I would, if there was any way to do so. Even if it's a technical glitch, it's odd enough I'd want to preserve it. This being a newer
phone, that seems less likely. Weird, in any case!

So there is no use in making screenshots as it doesn't seem to appear on them? That's strange.
If so, why don't you use any other phone to take a photo of your display so we can see the thing you are talking about here? Hm...
This would be the first thing I would do.

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